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ayyy twitter.com/taalumot/statu

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okay, fine, i will own up to it because i get annoyed when other people don't do that: this is a subtweet, but i have tried to mostly focus on what i want to see more of and hopefully i mostly succeeded

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Aella

@Aella_Girl

· Dec 23, 2021

Ppl who are real into astrology/conspiracies/woo beliefs *really* trigger me, but it's not because of the beliefs themselves, it's what it indicates about the person. To me, it implies a profound lack of curiosity in checking to see if their beliefs are true. 1/

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as you can see my pov is almost the exact opposite of the above: "aren't you *curious* what's going on with all this woo stuff, which has been happening uninterrupted to our species this whole-ass time we've been around, several times longer than science has?"

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i really like this question because it seems genuinely curious. i replied with five possibilities: wind currents, electrical / magnetic currents, smells, facial expression, body language. there’s a lot of information potentially available if you learn how to sift it

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𒐪

@SHL0MS

· Dec 24, 2021

Replying to @QiaochuYuan

which raw sensory data specifically? kinda surprised you see this as physics compatible

wind currents is maybe surprising but go into a building (say a gym) where there are people moving around but no windows open or AC so the air is still by default. close your eyes and see if you can notice changes in the air currents produced by other people’s movements

this is relevant to understanding experiences like knowing somebody is behind you even if they haven’t made any obvious sounds. we are probably sensitive to movements of the air below the level of conscious auditory perception. very sensible thing for an animal to be capable of

Aella

@Aella_Girl

in case it wasn't clear, the sort of inquiry you describe sounds great to me; the astrologers swamping my mentions almost entirely are approaching this from a "no the planets literally physically predict things and I actually believe this" direction unfortunately

i mean i didn't really make explicit what i thought the plausible mechanism of astrology is from this pov but that is consistent with it. a thing can predict another thing without a direct causal relationship between the two

we know the moon influences a lot of animal behavior, it's very bright and visible in the sky and its behavior is cyclic so that makes sense, you can set a biological rhythm to match it. the planets are distinguished from the other stars by being the "wanderers"

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8:32 AM · Dec 25, 2021Twitter Web App

and

@Aella_Girl

so, again, the raw sensory data is there for organisms to, gradually over evolutionary timescales, set biological rhythms to match the planets as well. i suspect this would be more obvious to us if more of us lived in places with zero light pollution

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and

but yeah, also i suspect i dodged your actual point which is about lack of curiosity? i am also not the biggest fan of lack of curiosity, on any side

Bernardo Subercaseaux

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and

I mean, it's not that it's a priori impossible for astronomical events to have impact on the behavior of animals, but 1) it's very weird to assume that most of the influence happens at birth 2) most astrology is very imprecise astronomically 3) studies show predictive power is 0

Bernardo Subercaseaux

@b_subercaseaux